


team building exercise '99

by sloane (quintic)



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: (baby's first death), Canon Compliant, Gen, Just gals bein pals, alcohol mention, character death mention, i mean theres lupcretia if you squint because u know me, swears, the team does something nice for lucretia :)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-09
Updated: 2018-03-09
Packaged: 2019-03-29 01:38:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13916607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quintic/pseuds/sloane
Summary: "This is great," she says, and runs her fingers fondly over a ballpoint pen drawing of the voidfish, "you guys did a fantastic job.""Yeah?" Lup seems very pleased with herself. "I did the most work."





	team building exercise '99

When Lucretia opens her eyes to the bright, familiar light that heralds the start of a new cycle, the first thing she remembers is death.

If she closes her eyes again it comes to her very fleetingly. She slipped, or... something? She remembers the sickening pain of hitting her head very hard, the way it whip-lashed down the length of her spine... she remembers somebody holding her hand.

She sighs.

"Hey, 'Creesh. You okay?"

When she opens her eyes, Magnus is looking at her with concern while the others start to slowly regroup behind him. They're chatting, peeling off from the main deck to go and check out what's waiting for them past the rails of the Starblaster.

"I'm good," she says, and glances down at her red uniform, brushing off imaginary dust. "Everything seems to be intact."

"Cool." He gives her a thumbs up. "First death under your belt, huh? How does it feel?"

"Strange," Lucretia says absentmindedly, patting herself down for something that doesn't seem to be on her, "I– oh, fuck. My book."

When exactly had she tapped out of the last cycle? She can't remember. Everything feels so strange. Lucretia tells herself this is all because she's just regenerated anew, despite knowing intimately that she's never felt like this at the start of a cycle before, but... it's not a big deal. They've all died before, excluding the captain. This isn't anything new. Lucretia has always known how it worked, and she thought that, perhaps, that may keep her from feeling rattled when the moment came to put all her theory into practice.

Apparently not.

That's not the point, though: a large amount of time has been lost. Time she would usually have spent journaling. There will be a half-filled in book sitting forever on her shelf with all the rest, its incompleteness making it stick out like a sore thumb.

She's so frustrated.

Magnus is still grinning at her, big and goofy.

"Go find Lup," he says, and holds up his finger when she opens her mouth to question him, "she has a surprise for you. I think she went out into the common area."

 

* * *

 

"You... finished it?"

"Yeah!" Lup tucks her hair behind her ear and sits down next to Lucretia on the couch, "we did it together, real group project styles. It came out pretty fucking fantastically if I do say so myself. _And_ I just did."

"Thank you," Lucretia says, still slightly in awe as she takes the book Lup is holding in both hands, turning it over. "That's uh, pretty... pretty cool of you to do."

"I know," Lup says, impatience creeping in on the edge of her excitement. When Lucretia doesn't make any move to open the book, she persists. "What are you waiting for? Get out that ink well and the ol' Lucretia stamp of approval already!"

The book is bulging slightly at the seams. Lup's got it held shut with a red rubber band.

"If I should be getting anything out, it's a red pen."

"Yeah, we didn't edit any of it. Thought we'd leave that for you, since you like doin' it so much."

"Oh, you're too kind, really."

Lucretia lets the book fall open in her lap and Lup presses closer, peering over her shoulder as she starts to read through the first few pages again. These are in her own hand of course, but it's helpful to familiarise herself with the planet that came before. It gives her an idea of the timeline too.

She can feel Lup's leg jiggling up and down impatiently next to her and reaches out without thinking to grab her knee.

"Simmer down. I'm a fast reader."

"Uh huh."

Lup continues to bounce her leg anyway so Lucretia lets her hand be jostled about as she reads through her own introduction. It's coming back to her now as she turns pages. A planet in soft neon: the sky mottled purple and pink, the green waterfalls, the yellow froth of the water. They'd landed in a little clearing beside the river with a nice view of a little village set into the hillside. She's got a few notes on the weather (mostly rainy), the atmosphere (breathable, unlike a planet two cycles before), the gravity (standard). The next page she flips to is just doodles, born from a day it had been raining too hard to take her notes outside. The next is blank.

Lup's leg stills.

She flips through and onto a star chart, lovingly detailed with various coordinates and little notes in small, chunky capital letters. Davenport's handwriting. Lucretia hums, impressed, and takes her hand back so she can lift the book up closer to her face. He must have spent multiple nights on this. It's beautiful in its complexity. He'd stuck in a sheet of black paper and drawn onto that in white ink so that the double-spread looks like a miniature version of the night sky above.

"I... didn't know Davenport was a uranographist."

"Neither! Apparently he's got a map for every cycle stashed in the control room, can you believe?"

Lucretia turns to her, eyes wide. "Seriously? Why didn't he say anything until now?"

"No clue. I think he's just been doing them for fun."

She'll come back to examine this more closely in a bit. The next page is by Lup, and her messy slanting cursive continues on for a few more. Lucretia flips them over to check. Every single page is dated small and neat, in the top hand corner and she can't help but smile.

"You really went all in on this, huh."

"Figured if you were going to skip out and drop all the work on us we may as well do it right, y'know?"

"I appreciate it," Lucretia says, and leans back against the armrest of the couch, getting comfortable even as Lup gives her arm a tug.

"You don't have to read it the whole way through _now._  Flick through it, I wanna see what you think!"

Lucretia holds the book out of her reach, shaking her head. "Nuh uh. Better get cozy Lup, I'm reading this thing from start to finish."

Lup huffs dramatically and pops up from the couch to disappear off in the general direction of the kitchen.

Lucretia hunkers down a little more with her book, and loses herself in Lup's handwriting. To start there's a hilarious little account of the way she had died: three _days_ in. Slipped on the riverbank after the heavy rains and hit her head on the rocks while trying to climb down to the shore (Lup's account doesn't detail it, but Lucretia's pretty sure she remembers vaguely it had been her hand that she had held). The whole thing is complete with a silly doodle of her with large, blocky **X** s over both her eyes, and it makes her laugh.

Lup details that the rest of them have decided to complete the book in her absence and then she journals the rest of their day, just like that. Like she's playing at being Lucretia. Her observations are more or less of the same calibre (though she does dedicate an entire paragraph to explaining what Taako was wearing at the time). Lucretia wonders if she hung back from the group to write, if she kept the book on her at all times. The dedication to the project keeps coaxing little smiles out of her.

Merle takes over now. His writing is large and loopy. He always forgets to dot his Is, cross his Ts. He's chronicling the different plants they've encountered and for every entry he adds in here and there he's included a dry cutting of the flora in question. One page in particular is littered with them, and they spill into her lap the moment she turns to it: little white and purple blooms with jagged edges and yellowing leaves.

(Unfortunately, every detailed entry of plant matter is concluded with something Merle has dubbed a 'sexy scale', arbitrarily scored out of five? Lucretia hurriedly passes over each of these judgements without any further inspection.)

At least Merle describes their surroundings, too. It seems like he takes over for a day or two here and there, just to chronicle where Lup obviously hasn't had time to. His accounts of their daily life are a little more vague than Lucretia would like, but it seems Lup has thought of this too because she's annotated his scarcer paragraphs with little notes and doodles. A lot of this is done to make any battles sound way cooler than they probably actually were, but Lucretia appreciates it all the same.

Barry writes about the science behind everything. He's got an interesting, mini dissertation about the pH levels of the water that spans a couple pages, complete with sample analysis and data collection. He writes about the sunsets, and patterns that he finds in nature. His handwriting is very neat, but when he is obviously excited about something the letters lose their form a little, become very loose in his haste to get the words to the page.

Lup joins her again as she's reading about what made up the composite of rocks outcropping around the Starblaster and hands her a large mug of clementine posset, boozy and sweet and warm. Lucretia accepts it with a murmur of thanks. Her eyes don't leave the book, but Lup seems to appreciate that she's in the zone right now. She manoeuvres herself in between Lucretia and the couch until she can see over her shoulder again, sort of tucked around her so she can read along and the contact of her is very soothing. Lucretia is more than happy to sit and read and drink, and all the while take reassurance in feeling Lup's breath against her cheek.

In contrast to Merle's dubious accounts, Barry's are hilariously clinical. He writes perhaps the most like Lucretia except that, _unlike_ her, he hasn't ever written anything fictional before. Everything is very bare bones, no nonsense. He writes about late night mapping with Davenport, and trying to pinpoint places to find the light, and about what they had for breakfast, and about Magnus pulling stupid pranks on Taako and it's all very generic, and full of sensible observation. Everything has the same tone, whether it's an important, scientific discovery or a humourous anecdote. 

Having Lup here with her is helpful because every so often she'll chime in with a joke, or with extra information. Sometimes she lets mage hand hoist her cup up high above her head for safe keeping and arrests the book from Lucretia to read bits out to her so she can do all the different voices, the tempo, the timing.

When Lucretia comes across a little doodle of Magnus with twin **X** s through both eyes, she clicks her tongue in sympathy.

"Yep, Mags kicked it too," Lup says unnecessarily, and tips her head right back to finish off her mug, "I bet you're real surprised right now."

"I cannot fathom this ever having happened to him," Lucretia says, and turns the page.

Taako got to write about all the food and the culture. He's actually gone ahead and penciled in recipes, little observations about native spices and local cuisine, and he's included swatches of fabric, cut out and pasted in. Little things Lucretia never would have thought to include in her records. Taako's always been thoughtful like that, and he's passionate about the things that he likes.

He's also written about magic.

"Oh, _wow_."

"Right," Lup says, and she sounds smug, "he said he didn't have time to do it and tried to brush me off but he got stuck in pretty quick. Took the book back to his room and everything."

The next couple pages detail complex notes on magic: both on the people inhabiting the Starblaster, and practices Taako had discovered were in use planet side. He's made several observations about the types of magic in use and the way that it's cast. Lucretia finds herself hooked on every single paragraph. Several pages of these seem to have accidentally acted as discussion forums, with other members of the IPRE adding their thoughts to his notes.

It looks like fun. Lucretia wishes she had been there. If she had, would any of this have happened? The rest of the crew leave little notes on her things sometimes, but never to this extent.

It's a lonely thought.

Lup notices she's staring at the same spot on the page, her shoulders rigid.

"You okay, Luce?"

"Yeah," Lucretia says, distracted, and takes a long sip of posset. "It's... how come you guys never do stuff like this when I am around?"

Lup is silent for a moment, then reaches up to card her hand through Lucretia's hair thoughtfully. Her fingers are warm from holding onto the mug. Lucretia recognises this gesture as something she does for Taako whenever he's stressed out.

"I dunno, Lux. You always seem to have a real good handle on your shit? Guess we just thought we might be disturbing your notes."

She points to a particular back and forth between Merle and herself, "like, this kinda junk? You don't need those questions answered because you've already figured it all out. You're just that smart."

"Thanks," Lucretia says automatically, uncertain as to whether or not she is reassured, "I guess."

"You weren't missing out on anything," Lup continues, finger combing her hair back from her face, "I promise. It was just same old same old. We wanted to write it all down to show that we miss what you do because it wouldn't be the same without a big book fulla stuff to go through at the end."

"Yeah."

They fall silent. Lup is twisting a lock of Lucretia's hair around her finger, and Lucretia leans into her touch, resting against her side.

"It's weird, isn't it." Lup says eventually. She's uncharacteristically quiet. "Dying for the first time, I mean."

Lucretia nods, still staring at Taako's beautifully interlocking cursive, the curly flicks of his Gs and Ys. It _is_ weird. There's a haze over the whole thing, like she's looking back on her memories through a sheet of frosted glass. She can see the outlines, but she can't make out any of the details.

If she stops and takes a moment to think about it, she supposes it all must be a softer version of shock. One isn't supposed to die and then come back, after all. No wonder her brain is trying to fudge all the information. 

"Does it... feel like this every time?"

"Nah." Lup stretches out beside her, long legs jutting off the end of the couch near her face. Lucretia follows suit. They're doing a weird top-and-tail thing now, lying side by side on the couch. "Gets easier, actually. You remember better every time."

"I suppose I'll have to practice," Lucretia says dryly, and pokes a finger into her side. Lup cackles and does a kick, squirming away as best she can.

"Don't! Keep reading."

She does.

Now that she's familiarised herself with what everybody's various jobs seem to have been in recording all of this, it's a pretty easy read. There is a lot of stuff stuck in that she has to pause and examine piece by piece. Little drawings on scrap paper, feathers, bits and pieces of wood or plant. Somebody has stuck a few coins to a page with tape, somebody else has attempted a rough sketch of the waterfall visible from the Starblaster. A relic from another rainy day, perhaps. Lup has been on an embroidery kick for the last four cycles now and there are samples of her work slapped between the pages too. The one that says 'U GOT AN INHALER? CUZ I HEARD U GOT _DAT ASS MA_ ' makes Lucretia laugh so hard she nearly rolls off the couch.

A lovely surprise comes in toward the end of the book.

Magnus' writing is almost unintelligible at some points because he writes on an _extreme_ slant. Sure, there are no lines ruled in the book to use but the rest of them are capable of keeping everything more or less neat and tidy. Magnus' hand is a disaster, and Lucretia has never been more pleased to see it.

"Magnus! I thought he died before he got to write anything in here."

"He said he was only gonna write from the back for some reason," Lup explains, lifting her head so Lucretia can see her very deliberate eye roll. "I can't pretend to understand him."

He's written about the animals he's discovered (and fought). He's even done little illustrations of them. The last planet had a lot of species of frog on it, apparently (or maybe he just felt like drawing a lot of frogs? Honestly, it's unclear). He's also, perhaps most excitingly, penned a detailed Fisher section full of updates on the voidfish, which Lucretia is absolutely delighted by. She hadn't ever given thought about where Fisher's tank would go in her absence but the answer is, of course, into Magnus' room.

"This is great," she says, and runs her fingers fondly over a ballpoint pen drawing of the voidfish, "you guys did a fantastic job."

"Yeah?" Lup seems very pleased with herself. "I did the most work."

"I can see that." She hadn't failed to notice that Lup seemed to be plugging in all the gaps, taking the most time to chronicle their day to day activities. "You gonna take over from me, since you're so good at it? Maybe I can be our evocation specialist, it's not too late for me to start multi-classing."

"No, no _way_." Lup sits up so suddenly Lucretia can't help but snort, "we had fun and it was a good, uh, team building exercise but now that you're back you can do the books again. _Please_. It was so weird not having you there."

" _Alright_ , unclench."

Secretly, she's touched. She fumbles the rubber band back across the cover of the book and leans back again, tipping her head until she's staring at the ceiling. It's nice, lying here with the book in her arms. She can hear Lup breathing down the other end of the couch and the vague uncertainty regarding her death is lessening with every passing moment. She's okay. They're all going to be okay.

There's one more question she wants to ask.

"... Did we save it? That world, I mean."

"Yeah," Lup says, and Lucretia feels the rest of the tension leave her in a soft rush of breath. "We saved it. Don't worry."

"Okay."

**Author's Note:**

> no the title isn't a reference to flight of the conchords' business time idk why you'd think that of me


End file.
